Night of the Demon Hunter
by Spiral of Dreams
Summary: Amidst blood and carnage, a young boy is unable to sleep.


It was a dark night.

The only source of illumination available was the pale moonlight sifting through the clouds of the night sky.

A young boy of no more than six sat on his futon, having been unable to sleep due to excitement. This was the excitement that a young boy would have on the night before the day of a festival, unable to sleep due to sheer anticipation. Earlier that night, his mother had told him to not think of anything and just sleep.

The boy, however, could sense the tension that was thick in the mansion, enough to kill off the spirits of everyone in the extended family that lived together. Well... everyone except for his father, that is. In his memories, his father had never let anything get to him. He never frowned, worried or fidgeted. During times like this, his father was the only person in the entire mansion who laughed. The boy somehow got the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with the laughter, though. It was not the usual joy-filled laughter that people made. As a matter of fact, it seemed to be the very opposite of 'joy-filled'. It was a hollow laugh, giving people the impression that he was laughing at some bitter irony of life that others were unable to comprehend. In short, it was the laugh of a broken man.

Of course, the young boy of six knew nothing of that, and did not think too much into it either. To the young boy, the man was his father first. Everything else that he was or still is was irrelevant and simply too unimportant to consider.

His inability to sleep was due to him accidentally overhearing his father talking with his aunt and uncle in his father's room that afternoon.

To the young boy, the mansion is way too massive a place to live in. It was a huge Japanese-styled mansion, with gardens that dwarfed the size of the actual mansion by several times. In the eyes of a small child, it seemed even bigger and it was a challenge simply to not get lost within the mansion. His room is his territory; the rest of the mansion was his playground. These were the rules that the young boy lived by subconsciously every day. Even though he had lived in the mansion for the entire of the six years of his life, hardly ever coming into contact with anyone outside of his family, he never got tired of his 'playground', being the child he was. He was just exploring the mansion on his own that late afternoon since his cousins were all too busy doing some 'training' to play with him. When he questioned them what the 'training' was for, they would somehow always end up talking about something else, so he never found out about the purpose of the 'training'. It was probably nothing of much interest though.

Coming back to the point, his father was talking to his aunt and uncle about something important in the room. What was said was mostly muffled from his ears due to the soundproof nature of the wooden walls. He could, however, make out one word that was continuously repeated in the course of the discussion and sounded distinctly foreign to his ears: 'toh-no'. What in the world does 'toh-no' mean, he did not know.

At that point in time, he only knew one thing. Something was going to happen that night. Something big. The boy did not know how he knew, he just knew. He also believed in it absolutely. If his father had known, he would probably have said something ambiguous that made absolutely no sense to him before letting off a dry amused chuckle. Something possibly along the lines of: "Trusting your instincts is a good way to survive".

It is perfectly possible, though, to logically explain the boy's absolute conviction. This was the result of two factors. One was the boy's natural brilliance. Given enough clues, the boy could easily figure out the current situation. It is the second factor that is a bit more complicated to explain.

The boy did not know of it because it was deemed unnecessary to tell him, but his family was abnormal. They possessed something known as a psychic ability, a mutation in normal human genes. This ability is the ability to see the thoughts and aura of others, something known as the Pure Eyes. Normally, such a psychic ability would have faded after one generation. However, the family managed to retain the ability for many generations through incestuous breeding, thus keeping the blood pure with the mutated genes and eventually tying it to their blood. It is with this ability that the boy saw the emotions of the adults in the mansion, helping him come to his conclusion of what was going to happen that night.

With that, he was unable to fall asleep even with clear instructions from his mother for him to do so.

Night had long since fallen by then.

The moonlight fell on the boy's futon through the partially opened windows, illuminating raven hair and onyx-colored eyes. The small child simply stared back up at the luminescent celestial body seemingly suspended in the black night sky.

Beautiful.

That one word described said celestial body perfectly.

Why had I not noticed such beauty until now?

Those were the thoughts in the child's head as the boy basked in the brilliance of the full moon, seemingly entranced by the sheer beauty and power radiating from it.

He was snapped out of his reverie, though, as the first sounds of battle were heard: the sounds of metal on metal, of gunfire, and of metal rending through flesh. Though no one knew it yet, it signaled the beginning of what would later be hailed in history as one of the last battles between the mixed blood and the demon hunters in their thousand year conflict with each other, also culminating in the fall of the last of the four founding families of the Demon Hunter Association of Japan.

The screaming soon began as the forests and courtyards pooled with crimson fluid.

Throughout it all, Nanaya Shiki never once moved from his spot on the futon.


End file.
